As Labour buys into more rip-off schemes
NEW LABOUR is outstripping the Tories as the party of privatisation - and working people are paying a heavy price.
It's not just the old-fashioned sell-offs which are doing the damage, but the injection of private capital and private management into existing public services - from the London Tube, to education, and increasingly the National Health Service.
The much-vaunted new NHS Plan involves a massive extension of the Tory-inspired Private Finance Initiative (PFI), through which hospitals and clinics are designed, built, maintained and serviced by profit-seeking private consortia - and leased back to NHS Trusts at a massive annual fee.
38 hospital schemes are now in the PFI pipeline, with an estimated total cost of £3.8 billion: Labour wants to boost this to £7 billion by 2010. Ministers claim these schemes offer value for money, but the only two PFI hospitals that have so far opened - in Carlisle and Dartford - represent a dire catalogue of planning foul-ups, shoddy construction and management ineptitude.
PFI not only inflates the cost of hospital building, it slashes the numbers of beds to treat patients, even while the government's Beds Enquiry calls for extra beds in the system.
PFI also brings a new onslaught on the jobs, pay and conditions of support staff, who are hived off to private contract firms. In Carlisle this has meant many domestics facing 12-hour shifts, compulsory weekend working or permanent nights. NHS staff switched to private employers also face the loss of their relatively generous NHS pension rights.
Hospital workers have recognised the danger, and begun fighting back. At London's University College Hospital, strikes by UNISON forced a ground-breaking deal which gives staff a veto over changes to their working conditions. Alan Milburn was even forced to step in to demand more beds be included in the £422m new hospital.
Last year, ministers ruled that future PFI schemes can focus exclusively on buildings, and not include the privatisation of support services: but there are no signs that the PFI consortia will agree to such a restriction on their profits.
As we go to press, 600 health workers at Dudley Hospitals Trust are now in their third spell of official strike action opposing their transfer to private contractors as part of a PFI scheme.
It's been a long time coming, but a real fight against Labour's privatisation offensive seems to have begun.
The Dudley strikers have correctly refused to sacrifice their conditions on the altar of private profit. The entire workers' movement must rally round to ensure that this brave stand succeeds, and profiteers think twice before bidding for PFI deals.